The present disclosure relates to file management in thin provisioning storage environments, and more specifically relates to resynchronizing files between a cache site and home site, including where the storage configurations at the home site and at the cache site are non-homogeneous.
Thin provisioning storage environments use virtualization to give the appearance of having available a greater amount of physical storage than is actually available. In a shared storage environment, thin provisioning allows for efficient utilization of physical storage resources. Thin provisioning allocates physical blocks of storage to an application as the blocks are actually used rather than as the blocks are reserved. A thin-provisioned device maintains a list of virtual storage blocks allocated to the application, but assigns a physical block to the virtual block only when a write operation is performed. Typical thin-provisioned devices will warn an administrator when the amount of available storage drops below a specified threshold. The administrator can then take action in response to the warning, such as allocating a new storage device or relocating data from the warning device to a different storage device.